Service providers provide products for sale over the telecommunications network and thereby obtain a revenue stream and/or provide access to a database of desired information or to live advisors typically for a fee. These pay services may include pay per product services such as home shopping or catalog services and pay for information services such as government services, banking and financial services, customer services, news services, polling and surveys, fund raising, marketing and promotion opportunities, dating services, health care information services, sports score services, weather services and the like. Typically a caller dials a 1-900 telephone number and is connected through the toll network to a service bureau where there is located an automatic call distributor (ACD) for routing calls to the next available service representative. Regardless of how the call is dialed, the service provider typically takes an order for a requested product or provides the requested information.
Fees vary for pay for information services and are billed via billing services provided by the toll network carrier, by a credit agency or by the service provider itself. The pay-per-product call is typically free to the user (but its cost is accounted for in the cost of the product to the consumer). Product charges which can amount to hundreds or even thousands of dollars for jewelry or appliances are either invoiced directly by the shopping or catalog service or through a credit agency. In regard to the pay for information call, the fee for the call may be recorded by the call, for example, one dollar per call. An example of such a call might be a sports call, where the caller is interested in obtaining a sports score for a recent event. In other instances, charges can run on the order of several dollars per minute, and the calls are variable in length up to twenty, thirty, forty minutes or even longer. In yet other instances, the call charges are preselected, that is, they may run $10.00 for the first five minutes and $1.50 per minute thereafter. Thus, a single call can run on the order of a hundred dollars or more. An example of such a more expensive service might be a medical advice call.
Revenue loss suffered by pay service providers from such pay calls can be substantial due to bad collections, insufficient identity of the caller and the like. Many pay services experience high uncollectible accounts receivable, regardless of whether the call is a pay per product or a pay for information call.
Automatic number identification has helped to identify in telecommunications toll fraud those callers who would defraud the network in advance of a call. Automatic number identification provides the telephone number or credit card number of the calling party. Through a credit look-up process, the toll network service provider may determine the caller's credit history at least in respect to their toll service bill. In other words, the toll network telecommunications service provider may verify through an ANI look-up an identification of those callers with good/bad credit history. A toll call can be blocked before it is completed through the network.
On the other hand, ANI is not available in all areas. Moreover, the pay service provider does not presently have access to such a credit check, They do not generally have sufficient control over what calls are permitted to go through and thus receive service. For example, a caller may call a 900 service and, having a good toll payment history, he provides a valid credit card number. The call can go through and the product or pay information service provided, but the caller may still not pay. In other words, the caller may have a good toll call payment history and a poor history of paying for a product or information provided by a 1-900 call. Consequently, a pay information service provider has little chance of protecting itself from the event of an uncollectible pay call or delivery of a product that will not be paid for.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,756,020 to Fodale describes call blocking in a toll network environment. In respect to the completion of toll calls, a calling party may enter a billing number such as a credit card or calling card number or other personal identification in order to permit a toll call to be completed. In the event of a bad credit card, for example, a toll office may disallow an extension of an initiated call through the toll network based on an invalid credit card or one having poor credit history. An announcement may be provided of the disallowance of the call. The toll witch most commonly used in the United States toll communications network is the #4 Electronic Switching System (#4ESS) offered by Lucent Technologies, Inc. The #4ESS takes the ANI (typically the caller's telephone number) and the called party's telephone number and sends the information to a network control processor (NCP). Alternatively, when the caller is calling, for example, from a pay phone, the caller's credit card number replaces the calling telephone number as the ANI data. If the billing number (telephone number or credit card number) proves to be delinquent, the controller sends a message to the #4ESS to disallow the call, and the call is never completed to the called party, saving toll network resources.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,311,572 to Friedes et al. describes, in a toll network, how a customized billing record may be created for a subscriber and if calling party origination information (such as ANI) is insufficient to affirmatively identify the caller, the information may be supplemented through caller entered information by a prompting device which solicits, during call setup, any additional information to delineate a more precise profile of the caller and, if predetermined criteria of the toll network service provider is met, allow the call to proceed.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,023,904 to Kaplan et al. describes a direct telephone dial ordering service available through a telecommunications carrier. A special telephone number can handle up to 100 vendors and one million products per vendor. A caller calls a special exchange, the particular telephone number for a vendor (vendor number 21) and is prompted to enter an eight digit product code (or 1 million product codes per vendor) through a catalog look-up. Assuming the product code number is 55743210, a vendor number 21 and a carrier exchange number 915, then the number placed in the particular vendor's catalog is 10 915 215 5743210. The caller calls that number to obtain that product. The caller then can be prompted to order more products in the same call and/or acknowledge that the order has been received. A data processor can verify whether the calling customer is a subscribing customer by looking their telephone number up in a database and determining if their credit is satisfactory. The recovered information is batch processed and forwarded to the vendor for further processing of the orders taken. A Feature Group D Service Access Code 6-digit translation dialing plan is also described. Nevertheless, there does not appear to be any sharing of credit information in the described service and the calling scheme requires a particular dialing plan that is product code related.
Another problem for pay information service providers whose callers can accumulate more than two dollars or more in fees per call is that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requires that they provide a non-interruptible preamble message before any service is in fact provided. The message is to advise the caller of the fee and afford the caller the opportunity to abandon the call without invoking the fee. These announcements are presently provided at the pay information service bureau location, after the caller has been connected through the toll network to the service provider's ACD. The caller is, thus, tying up service provider and toll network equipment just to hear an announcement and may choose not to go through with the pay call.
Consequently, while call blocking in the toll network is known in the event of bad ANI or credit card entry and pay service providers may provide direct product ordering services, there remains a need in the art to provide for improved call screening or call blocking prior to the completion of a call through the toll network to a pay service provider, improved product delivery systems with greater assurance of product revenue recovery and further permit the pay service provider the opportunity to provide announcement services and perform call blocking according to their own predetermined criteria prior to call completion through the toll network to the pay service provider.